The LessWrong team might be putting more work into the shortform concept in the next couple weeks. I wanted to check in about what specific features people might want for that.

Right now, some users set up "shortform feed" posts, which are a hacky way to give yourself a more casual space for off-the-cuff writing. In the past few weeks we've seen an uptick of people creating feeds for themselves.

It seemed useful to make this a bit more official (i.e. there's just a "create shortform post" button you can click instead of navigating to a post and writing a comment).

But there's several open questions about the best way to consume shortform content. Right now most shortform comments appear in Recent Discussion and then quickly disappear, which is very low-discoverability.

Possible considerations include:

Some people like low-discoverability. Sometimes what you want is a low-visibility place where you can write up thoughts without people immediately judging you for it, to help flesh out early stage ideas. For those people, the status quo is sorta fine.
Some people want more visibility. I know I personally would prefer my shortform feed to get maybe 5x the visibility it currently gets – I care less about the visibility and more about the vibe of "low effort casual space."

There's a few possible routes to more visibility:

Treating shortform more as a special case, where new shortform posts get displayed at the top of recent discussion, or potentially each day listing on the Daily/AllPosts page. (This might include entire comments, or might include a quick list of which shortform feeds got updated recently)
More generally improve the visibility of comments on old posts, with shortform just being one type of old post. This has the benefit of making commenting on old posts feel less like shouting into the void.
Creating a special shortform feed view page, and/or create a setting on Recent Discussion where shortform becomes the primary thing you're skimming, rather than a mixture of post-discussion.

There might be entirely different frames or ideas I haven't thought of.

Anyone have preferences on how to consume shortform?

(Also relevant would be if you find shortform actively annoying and would want to make sure it didn't get too much in your way)